WaPo | In the three months since Brown’s killing we have come to learn that collective failures of leadership are just the tip of the iceberg of problems in
Ferguson. My colleague Radley Balko reported extensively on how municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty.
“If you were tasked with designing a regional system of government
guaranteed to produce racial conflict, anger, and resentment,” he wrote,
“you’d be hard pressed to do better than St. Louis County.” The
inherent mistrust of police, the grand jury process and the motives of
elected and law enforcement officials that we have seen from blacks in
Ferguson can be traced back to the Balko’s observation.
